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The V Book: A Doctor's Guide to Complete Vulvovaginal Health - Softcover

Stewart M.D., Elizabeth G.; Spencer, Paula

 
9780553381146: The V Book: A Doctor's Guide to Complete Vulvovaginal Health
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0553381148 ISBN 13: 9780553381146
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

The Groundbreaking Guide Every Woman Needs

With The V Book, women will learn everything they need to know about the basics of vulvovaginal—or “V”–health, an essential yet often overlooked area of women’s health. Dr. Elizabeth G. Stewart, the nation’s foremost expert in vulvovaginal care and sexual-pain disorders, answers the questions about the all too common “V” ailments that women are embarrassed to discuss even with their doctors.

Drawing upon the latest medical research and two decades of experience treating thousands of women in her specialized gynecological practice, Dr. Stewart has compiled a wealth of information and advice. This
comprehensive and authoritative guide for women of all ages includes:

• How your vulvovaginal concerns change throughout the life cycle, from your teens through menopause and beyond
• How to pick a good gynecologist, and how to ask the right questions
• Dos and don’ts of V hygiene—and why sometimes less is better
• The safest use of tampons, pads, and pantiliners
• How to handle common symptoms, such as redness, itching, dryness, and discharge
• Which medical tests you should insist upon from your doctor
• Tips for safe and pleasurable sex, and what to do when sexual intercourse is painful
• The latest research on vulvodynia, the vaginal pain syndrome that won’t go away
• Diagnosing and treating yeast infections, allergies, and other ailments
• What to do if your doctor detects cancer or precancer cells

And much, much more...

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Elizabeth Gunther Stewart, M.D., FACOG, a Boston-based gynecologist, is director of the Stewart-Forbes Vulvovaginal Specialty Service at Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates. Dr. Stewart is also Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Harvard Medical School and a member of Brigham and Women's Hospital staff. She speaks extensively about vulvovaginal disease to medical professionals. Her perspectives as a full-time vulvovaginal practitioner, a researcher, and a teacher shape her prominence as one of the leading voices advocating the emerging importance of her specialty. This book is an extension of her lectures, her clinical experience with patients, and patient-education materials she has prepared for them.

Paula Spencer is a freelance writer whose eight books include The V Book and Momfidence!: An Oreo Never Killed Anybody and Other Secrets of Happier Parenting. Author of the “Momfidence!” column in Woman’s Day, she is also a contributing editor to Parenting and Baby Talk. She lives with her husband and four children in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

oundbreaking Guide Every Woman Needs

With The V Book, women will learn everything they need to know about the basics of vulvovaginal--or “V”--health, an essential yet often overlooked area of women’s health. Dr. Elizabeth G. Stewart, the nation’s foremost expert in vulvovaginal care and sexual-pain disorders, answers the questions about the all too common “V” ailments that women are embarrassed to discuss even with their doctors.

Drawing upon the latest medical research and two decades of experience treating thousands of women in her specialized gynecological practice,
Dr. Stewart has compiled a wealth of information and advice. This
comprehensive and authoritative guide for women of all ages includes:

• How your vulvovaginal concerns change throughout the life cycle, from your teens through menopause and beyond
• How to pick a good gynecologist, and how to ask the right quest

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One


The Mind
Why V Health Starts Here

Vagina is hardly a household word. Vulva and clitoris might as well belong to another language. They are blushers, vaguely subversive, not ready for prime time. They hide behind pet names and euphemisms ("my privates," "Pookie," "down there") if they're called anything at all. And then there's vestibule. That word's easy to say only because 99 out of 100 women have no idea that they have one, let alone where it is or what it does. (Don't worry. I'll show you later.) I feel pretty sure that a man would not allow some important part of his terrain to go uncharted for so long.

Believe it or not, even medical professionals can be uncomfortable about V terms. My own vulvar specialty practice in Boston is called the Stewart-Forbes Specialty Service. It's named after me and my nurse-practitioner partner, Diana Parks-Forbes, because at the time we were deliberating about what to call it, no one in the medical group's administration wanted the word vulva or vagina in the name. As a result, I surprise many new patients when I first walk into the exam room. "You're a woman!" they'll exclaim. They expected a gentleman named Stewart Forbes. The practice's vague name is hardly helpful to me professionally, either. Whenever I write a business letter or call a colleague, I always have to clarify that I represent the Stewart-Forbes Vulvovaginal Specialty Service. (Even so, Dr. Stewart Forbes gets lots of letters!)

I wish everyone could be matter-of-fact about the Vs. How much better my life-and your health-might be.

The first step to being comfortable with your body, after all, is being comfortable thinking about it (if not talking about it). That's why I say that V health starts in your head. As a physician, I'm a big believer in "liberation biology," to use the term coined by Mary Carlson, associate professor of psychiatry and neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. That means using biological information to help you understand your body, shake your hang-ups, and take charge of your full potential as a woman. In V terms, that means recognizing that the vulva and vagina are healthy parts of the body to be protected from disease, explored and treasured in responsible sexual life, esteemed for childbearing. I'd like for every woman to feel free enough to learn her way around her own body, free enough to talk easily to her doctor if a problem crops up.

Why are we so awkward about such commonplace body parts? Reticence about the vulva and vagina is nothing new. I'm no anthropologist or historian, but I do know that a veil has been draped over these parts for not merely a few generations but thousands of years. Knowing this past helps explain where our collective mind-set is today. Moreover, such information points the way to where our thinking ought to go.

So let's start at the beginning.

A short history of the Vs

Once upon a time people did not feel negatively about the vulva and vagina. Tens of thousands of years ago, the beautiful design of the vulva was something celebrated, even revered. The yoni, a symbol of the female genitalia, took many forms. Flowers, fruits, a triangle, and a double-pointed oval shape were all used to depict the vulva. Yoni is a Sanskrit word for "womb, origin, source, sacred place"-honoring the vulva's role as birthplace, bringer of life. Today the word yoni enjoys a renaissance as a way to refer to female genitalia, although its use is hardly widespread.

For a time, this symbol was worshiped as more powerful than its male counterpart, the phallus.1 This was a time when the basic facts of biology that we take for granted today were yet unrecognized. That women were fertile year round, unlike the rest of the animal kingdom, inspired awe. Menstruation-painless bleeding-was a mystery. A woman's periods, not a man's sperm, were linked to the miracle of birth. Women seemed to give birth by their own divine power.

Rock carvings and chiseled figurines of ancient goddesses, their vulvas prominent, have been found dating back as much as thirty thousand years. People are thought to have worn amulets featuring the yoni both to protect them and to bring fertility. They conducted celebratory and fertility rituals at natural rock formations that seemed to echo the shape of the vulva. Some of these sites can still be seen today, in such places as lower Yemen; Tongariro National Park in New Zealand; Koh Samui, Thailand; and the southern California desert. Sheila-na-gig statues-stone carvings of a squatting or reclining naked woman prominently displaying her vulva-have been found in old churches or buried in churchyards throughout Ireland and in parts of Scotland, England, and France. Their purpose is unknown. It's been speculated that the Celtic or pre-Celtic statues-many of which were buried or disposed of during the prudish Victorian era-were protectors from evil, bringers of luck, or fertility goddesses.

Many historians suggest that this veneration of the vulva-and in turn of the woman who is able to produce a child from those inner secret places-led to fear of her goddesslike power. Eventually, everything associated with the goddess was denigrated.2 Goddess worship came to an end around the globe, replaced by the male-oriented cultures, religions, and mythologies we're familiar with today.

We don't know what happened in the centuries after the fall of the yoni culture. Though the vulva was no longer venerated, it may not have been off-limits to medical minds. Evidence from ancient Greece and other civilizations reveals that physicians of these times knew a surprising amount of gynecology.3 From the time of Hippocrates (c. 460-c. 377 bce), such things as dilatation of the cervix, uterine infections and prolapse, ovarian cysts, and pelvic infection were accurately described. How much vulvovaginal knowledge existed is unclear. Maybe not a lot, but things such as growths and inflammatory conditions of the vulva were documented.

Methods of examination that women are familiar with today existed long ago too. The Egyptians practiced vaginal examination long before the time of Hippocrates. The position of a woman on her back, knees flexed and legs separated (called lithotomy), for the investigation of gynecological troubles was described by a famous Greek surgeon, Archigenes, who practiced in Rome around 120 ce. We don't have any record of what Greek and Roman women thought of pelvic exams, but I can guess, can't you? Not all cultures were comfortable with genital anatomy and examinations: In ancient China, the diagnostic dolls used for the female patient to discreetly point out the location of her symptoms had no vulva.

Unfortunately, gynecology's early sophistication didn't continue. Thanks to the lack of free communication between various countries, the scanty dissemination of knowledge by means of books, and the overthrow of nations by war, medical knowledge was not transmitted from one generation to another, as it is today. For centuries there was a yawning lack of information; by the beginning of the nineteenth century, Europeans had only a fraction of the gynecological knowledge that had been attained by the Greek and Arabian masters.5

Even during the time women's gynecological problems were being treated in ancient Greece, its practitioners were flying a bit blind. No thorough knowledge of anatomy, male or female, existed until the time of Claudius Galen, court physician to Marcus Aurelius, who lived 130-200 ce. A leading medical authority of antiquity, Galen's fame rests solely on his dissections and descriptions of the female genitalia in animals.6 He never worked on a woman. Along with his successors for the next two thousand years, he thought the human body was basically unisexual and that the two sexes...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0553381148
ISBN 13 
9780553381146
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
480
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
GPSR Kontakt
gpsr@libri.de

Europaallee 1
Bad Hersfeld
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Deutschland